Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

I was in the same boat. I ended up bouncing because it was so bad I couldn't stand it. But to me, that should be the solution- if you don't like it, don't participate in it.

We live in an age where people seem to think in very black and white terms and if your beliefs don't align you shouldn't have them or be able to voice them.

Aside from inciting violence, your beliefs are yours. If they aren't breaking the law, you do you. I don't have to agree with them or support them, essentially 'don't tread on me'.

But people need to remember when you deplatform these racist, ugly thoughts and words, you push those people together, galvanizing them and their beliefs. As others in this thread have stated, I believe that's why voat got so bad so quickly.

As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

I don't know what the end all solution is here, but I know I deal with racism on an almost daily basis in real life, and I'm Hispanic, so I can't imagine how bad it must be for some others. Pretending it doesn't exist won't fix it. Pushing it to the furthest corners of the internet won't make it go away in real life.

>Such harms can be reliably detected, with stringent enough criteria.

Mental harms, in many cases, can also be detected by competent professionals; besides that, it is entirely possible for physical harms to heal and for supporting evidence of their infliction be used to convict. Further, many physical harms depend at least partially on the victim's characteristics or situation; a concert pianist is arguably harmed more by someone cutting off his finger than a schoolteacher would be, for instance. Many physical harms that are rightfully legislated against often require the testimony of the victim for the case to succeed. For a wide class of 'mental harms' it is accurate to say that they are indeed physiological responses - from PTSD to lethargy and insomnia. This is in contrast to the caricature that mental harms are necessarily merely 'hurt feelings'.

I also have concerns that the difficulty or the fact of sometimes being nebulous features of mental harms should necessarily rule out such lawmaking. At best, the minimum for proving such harm should at least be set out by the legislators or judiciary, if the standard of evidence is the roadblock to legislation.

It's also worth remembering that we're talking about harms here, not mere hurts. Harms are much harder to fabricate than hurts are.

Some problems don’t have easy simple solutions. Any answer will have some outside cases.

If a schizophrenic parent has in the past harmed someone, should a court ignore this when determining custody. It is unfair. If you err on being too lenient some people will be harmed. If you err on being stringent some people will be harmed.

Complex problem cannot be solved with ideology and maxims. All solutions will fail some people sometimes.

The tech industry is a place where people generally prefer to talk things out rather than yelling and shaming. I think that's worth protecting, even if we see short term gains that might be available from defection. After all, once Google realizes the norms have changed, won't they be able to leverage their resources to find people who yell louder and shame more frequently than you?

It’s removing resilience for perception of efficiency.

There’s value in normalizing around shared needs, food and infra.

But beyond that the normalizing always happens in a direction of the haves.

It’s a biological truism of our society we’ll avoid confrontation with each other. Which enables exactly the issue we have socially: everyone is too scared to say no, enabling that does not align with an ideology of freedom for the public.

Freedom from having our consciousness filled with the narrative all the choices society has made to this point were reasonable regardless of the alternatives offered at the time (they’re usually many, and arguably many would have been better benefit to humanity, like the Navy getting Congress to pivot away from a decade of thorium reactor funding and research to Uranium reactors so the Navy has weapons grade materials available. True story, learned about researching energy policy and infra).

Anyway, the point is, normalizing around the basics, food, shelter, medicine. That makes sense.

Normalizing around social frameworks outside that above just leads to gate keeping.

Gotta get through HR, interviews, don’t even bother with FAANG you aren’t that smart.

They’ve smoothed off interviewing for a what feels like efficiency. Are they even hiring smart people or good role players? You can’t get scientific with HR that’s law so the bar has to drop at some point. Lots of capital to leverage on lots of output isn’t evidence of especially clever engineers.

How easily we discard variables to get to a task we can accomplish in a day. I have a hard time believing these giant tent pole ideas humans try to build are ever anything more than a whole lot of emotional indirection to glorious past (which by any real measure was usually awful for the masses) and a whole lot of “same old shit different generation.”